The new rules issued by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) to curb the misuse of debit and credit cards in the country have come into effect today.
As per the new policy, which was revealed in January, banks at the time of card issuance should allow only domestic card transactions at ATMs and PoS terminals.
To ensure greater security and convenience of cardholders, they can now enable or disable their cards themselves for specific uses.
The same flexibility is now also given for other types of uses: domestic, international, online, physical, and contactless.
Credit cardholders can make the switch themselves, “based on their risk perception.
Customers with old cards can take a call whether to disable any of these features.
Until now, these services used to come automatically with the card. However, now they can be activated only if the customer personally requests for them.
Furthermore, if customers have never carried out any online transaction with their card until now, then these services will automatically be stopped on these cards.
Banks have also been asked by the RBI to offer customers mobile banking, net banking option to enable limit and activate or deactivate service anytime on all days.
Security of payments cards is a massive issue in India. Last month, Singaporean cybersecurity firm Group-IB found 461,976 payment card details, mostly from Indian banks, available for sale on the dark web marketplace Joker’s Stash.
A report by Worldline India has revealed Unified Payments Interface (UPI) beating credit and debit cards as well as immediate payment services (IMPS) to become India’s most preferred mode of payment in terms of volume.
